Sintel Anim Test - 01

As a natural progression on from my previous two posts, playing with making pose tests with the Sintel Lite (v2) rig, I've spent the weekend playing around doing some character animation for the first time in ages (perhaps over a year!) There result can be seen below (when Vimeo decides to make it available, that is :)


Aligorith Sintel Test Skit - 01

More Sintel Posing Fun

So... making these pose tests can get quite fun is a lot of fun.


Starting with a few poses I'd been thinking about since yesterday (but didn't manage to do yet), I started making copies of them and tinkering with small details a bit. This quickly and naturally lead to little progression-sequences, like the one above.

Fun with Sintel "Lite" - Adventures with Posing and Bad-Hair Days

Recently, Ben Dansie posted a thread on BA (at the time of writing, the BA server has been down for the past day or two... perhaps at some point it might come back) reporting his progress in making a "lite" version of the Sintel rig from the Durian Open Movie Project. This is currently at version 2 (EDIT: link here - 11mb Zip).

Spikey

Seen on the trees bordering the access road to visit grandma...

In autumn, this same road will once again be lined with scores of mid-aged/elderly Chinese beating the living daylights out of the trees to get these fluffy tennis balls down. Down, off the trees, down into waiting buckets and baskets, down into makeshift bags and carriers.

Meanwhile, down at the local grocery stores, abundant supplies of chestnuts at rock bottom prices appear on the shelves... I never did get to find out what granny thought of kids taking fruit off her fruit trees ;)

Windows Command-Line tips (and UI ramblings)

Just a little quick tip I stumbled across which I thought would be of interest to Windows users out there.

From Windows Vista onwards (?  I'm not sure about Win7 though...), you can bring up a command-line prompt with its current directory set to be any folder on your computer by simply:

Shift-RMB on a folder, and choosing "Open Command Window Here"

Finally I might not need to create command-prompt shortcuts all around the place (though with my mouse's dodgy RMB, which is probably on its way out, with its frequent accidental double-clicks, I might still keep them for some rainy-days), or try and look for an alternative to the old Powertool for WinXP.

Fly

I don't usually take photos of insects (and especially flies, which are best left for my fly swat), but this guy was just sitting on a leaf waiting to be photographed yesterday morning while I took a walk around the garden.

This is quite a tight crop of the original shot, although not as much as for the silvereye shots. After taking this one, I did manage to take a few more shots at half the distance or closer, though those all turned out blurry as the leaf was starting to get bumped around by a light breeze moving through.

BlenderDev - Clearing the todo's...

Just a little update on what I've been up to lately: clearing out some Blender todo's I've had lurking around for ages.

Some Highlights:

1. Markers can now be edited from the various animation editors again
2. Added Grease Pencil "Sketching Sessions" Functionality
3. Partially Restored "Grease Pencil" mode in DopeSheet
4. Driver creation tweaks and hacks

On the matters of code quality...

I don't usually link-dump, but this following sketch sums up software engineering quite nicely...

http://xkcd.com/844/

Talk about there being a "software crisis"! :P

Photo Collages...

A picture says a thousand words... A collection of photos tells a story.

Recently between coding work on two different projects and an ongoing home renovation project, I've been busy taking photos for fun. While browsing through each day's "takings", I found that some of them looked quite good in combination with each other more so than if they were just standalone.

So, while playing around with ways of combining them, I stumbled across Picasa's Collage tool, which does a surprisingly good job of getting an eye-pleasing arrangement without much work a lot of the time. Without further ado, here are the pics!

SVN Rant - Why is there no global "don't expand keywords" setting

After getting fed up with SVN's disgusting "merge" facilities, I ended up coding (and am still working on) Duality SVN which will eventually work around having to use them. But today, I'm getting fed up with the lack of a way to disable the "keyword expansion" facilities...

[Rigging FAQ] Addedum Info on Drivers System

Re-reading my earlier post on the Drivers system, I realised that I overlooked mentioning a few things that I had intended to mention. Also, there have been a few small changes since then which I thought should be mentioned.

(Sometimes it's all too easy to forget which aspects I've mentioned and which I haven't, and where I might've or mightn't have mentioned them... such is the nature of answering these questions countless times on forum posts before trying to write blog-posts to act as a somewhat-definitive source of reference)